First off, this is mostly speculation and will hopefully be answered in th matrix sourcebook in 6months-2years.

How does the matrix work for militaries, military engagements and the like?

I assume if it's black ops/off the book then like normal since the military decker won't be sanctioned, but what about if there is an engagement between two militaries (corp or national)? Do the military deckers build up OS as they carry out actions defending or engaging? Or would they be sanctioned personas operating agaisnt sanctioned persona/legitimate hosts/devices?

Example: Salish and Tshimish go to war again. A Salish military decker is attempting to shutdown the security grid of a Tshimish military base. They are legally at war so what would happen? Would the decker eventually get dumped and reported?

As well, how would remote installations work? I would assume they would have their own grid, but not be a host (and therefore findable on the whole matrix). Would it be a private grid with a series of private and secured nodes, or would it be a private grid with a private host only on the one grid? If the grid connected to the rest I the matrix could you then not use the public (free but drek) grid to then access it?

I anint touching this with a 10' pole.

except to say 'Check out this thread http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?showtopic=40269

It gets derailed with military decking at some point.

In short, there is no defined way this works because Shadowrun is written from the perspective of a very selective niche.

his first question, at least, is fairly new.

my personal opinion:

GOD is a corporate-run organization. if the military organizations in question have paid their bills and are in good standing with the corporate court, the corporate court doesn't care if they're trying to shoot each other. neither side has to deal with OS.

but if you're talking about, say, aztlan vs the assorted rebels in the yucatan peninsula (not that the situation is quite the same over there), you'd have the corporate-sponsored forces free of OS, but not the rebels.

GOD doesn't exist to enforce the law or peace or anything like that. it exists to make sure the matrix favours their corporate masters. so long as you're giving them enough money and not harming their ability to make money, they don't much care what you're doing.

edit: to the second question, the matrix pretty much reaches everywhere there isn't jamming. they probably have their own grid, such as it is (and it's probably the only one), but it wouldn't be impossible to find since it would (so far as we know presently) still be a part of the regular matrix. also, hosts in hidden mode are pretty hard to find, so there's no reason such a facility couldn't use a host.

Given the rules as written, no sane military has any real need for a decker in the field because using wireless-active gear is suicide for ground troops if the opposing electronic warfare unit is any good at all. Even a milspec host is compromised the very moment a single piece of gear connected to it is in enemy hands.

Military usage (or field usage in general) was poorly thought out in the rules as published and may possibly be filled in with devices and rules that will be released in later books.

Yet the preview #4 is up and they are talking about decking for small unit tactics, so the fluff is still being pushed for this. Will have to see what the rest of the chapter offers for this in the game info section.

With the ability to turn off wireless connectivity and the fact that wired interaction is a useable security measure, I would think military deckers would be both relevant, often required, and relatively able to remain silent.

I imagine that militaries are governed by the same Matrix Rules as anyone else. After all the GOD are there to ensure the sanctity of their creation and any ways for militaries to bypass their kingdom would be pretty quickly diseminated into the shadows a la Bradley (Angela?) Manning style.

That said the military forces would definitely have their own proprietary hosts or even minor grids to run off of, depending on relative wealth or influence. I also imagine that established Corp forces may be able to grease the wheels a bit when it comes to Overwatch scores:

"Sergeant, the GODs have seen fit to grant us a Six-Zero minute opening. Get your boys moving and make the most of it before it expires."

I don't understand why they wouldn't have deckers on the frontlines? Clearly the person that controls the frontline's Matrix gets access to seemingly instantaneous communications and your units get to use their wireless boni with impunity.

You have illustrated a pretty good reason to not use hosts, which makes sense. But if you compromise a master device, it does not get you access to all of a unit's gear. Thus decks would probably be prefered. Like the book says, hosts are usually limited to the number of devices that can securely be slaved to it. So probably a military base, not every persons gear on the frontline, since they can't guarantee protection fort every person's gear on the frontline.

the problem with assuming decks all over the place is that it is ridiculously cheaper to jam everything so that even if you lose the matrix battle, the other side won't get their matrix bonuses.

so even if one side has a ridiculously superior matrix presence (which is going to cost enough money that you could probably outfit another two regular soldiers with a lot of cyberware, at the very least), the other side can relatively easily negate the wireless bonuses obtained through it.

i mean, it's 345,000 just for the cyberdeck. and then the other side just pulls out a 1200 nuyen rating 6 directional jammer (assuming military organizations don't have access to stronger ones) and there goes all your stupid wireless bonuses. won't shut down riggers, but just about anything else is gonna get wrecked. if we presume they stack (RAW they would, RAI is about as clear as mud on this), it's impossible to defend against it (if it doesn't stack it's just really hard to defend against) once you're in range. not to mention they could just lob area jammers at you if they want, which greatly extends the range.

Umm...how would a Rating 6 directional, broad spectrum jammer screw up all decking but still allow Riggers using wireless links to work with impunity?

Lets pretend we're Aztlan, and we're fighting the dangerous Amazonian rebels. Presumably Amazonia will have a lot of area jammers on the frontline to deny us our wireless boni. But assuming they want to keep their wireless boni, they run the jammers with their wireless on. So our Aztlan deckers will have to fight the jammers with a -6 from the noise, but assuming that the decker is half decently skilled say 10dp, that's still 4 DP to brute force and data spike the jammers. Of course, the Amazonian decker won't have any of that, so will attempt to brick the Aztlan decker's deck. So of course, Aztlan deploys its own jammers to even the odds and now they're both on even footing and both taking a -6.

So lets say, that the Aztlan decker wins in this annoyingly noisy frontline combat. The Amazonian Decker turns off all wireless on the jammers, so they're still jamming, but are now jamming all signals, which does hurt the Amazonian forces, but it also hurts the Aztlan forces.

I thought, there might be an ECCM action like in SR4...but nope. that's kind of annoying. But an interesting symbiosis is that RCCs have noise reduction. So if Aztlan has a rigger, they can have the unit's gear slaved to the RCC and get their wireless boni that way, since the RCC should be able to cut through the noise. And since the Aztlan decker won the decker duel, Aztlan now controls the Matrix on the frontline, so the RCC can cut through that noise with no problem.

I think I like the idea of giving RCCs and Decks their own niche in Matrix defense/offense. You slave to the RCC, when someone is jamming you. You slave to the deck when you want to run your gear silent. And you slave to a commlink, when you're a Technomancer or have no Matrix defense otherwise. I don't like that last one as much.

why would the rebels even bother having their own cyberdecks?

if they know they're going to get pwned in the matrix, they just opt out of the matrix, and spend the much smaller amount of resources required to force aztlan out of the matrix as well. particularly since devices out in the jungle are already going to be suffering noise, in that particular conflict it's quite possible even an RCC won't get you a clear connection (and in any event, you couldn't wirelessly connect to the RCC for it; you'd need each soldier to be carrying around high rating RCCs with cables to each and every one of their devices).

seriously. the rebels have the choice of spending hundreds of thousands of nuyen for every few soldiers to lose in the matrix, or they can just decide to opt out themselves, spend a tiny fraction of that amount, and take away aztlan's advantage entirely. well, take away their wireless bonuses anyways. there's always the "we have a truly obscene amount of resources" advantage, which is not so easily countered, unless aztlan is foolish enough to actually outfit their military with hundreds of thousands of nuyen worth of hardware (probably 1 deck per 2-3 soldiers, which adds up really fast when the per unit cost is crazy high) instead of spending that money on more effective ways to win the fight.

More dakka?

I fail to see why the RCC noise reduction isn't 2 way. That'd make the RCC's noise reduction pointless because any jammer would make it so that an RCC cannot connect to its drones. Since drones will have as much noise filtering as a smartgun.

For some reason, I was thinking the frontline was actually going to be in a city. Though, I do have to admit, that in the jungle, there would be so much noise do to plant life that any Matrix warfare wouldn't be effective there. Though, I do think it is worth wild to have wireless on when assaulting a city, because its not guarantied that you will lose in the Matrix. And if you can win, then your side has the advantage on the battlefield.

The bonuc supposedly only applies to the link between the rigger and his RCC, not between teh RCC and its slaved drones.

Mutally assured destruction and cost. If you're not using a host, due to the even more restrictive slaving limits of a 'deck you need a trained decker and his massively expensive cyberdeck in each squad to do ECM/ECCM and keep their gear running. Since the general assumption of the setting right now is that people don't just do the smart thing and turn off all their wireless.

So on one hand, you have very expensive hosts that are easily compromised as soon as you start taking casualties, if the opponents have any Matrix assets in the field. On the other, you have an even more expensive problem of fielding enough deckers and tech to secure a force. This leads to a situation where a low-tech insurgent force like the rebels are actually at a fairly strong advantage, as they don't have to worry about any of that in exchange for a minor decrease in effectiveness... and a lesser investment in deckers of their own will have a much higher return on investment as they can get strong benefits out of much less expenditure.

In short, the way it's written leads to a very counter-intuitive result when extrapolated from the squad size the game is usually played on to the game world at large.

That's bullshit though. Without communication the rebels would be at a complete tactical disadvantage and would never win, and only hope for a war of attrition with gorilla tactics. While the opposition has complete, if slightly noisy, Matrix control. They'll be able to have coordinated attacks, drones, sensors, maybe a tac-net assuming we get rules for that, wireless boni on their gear, and other things that wireless communications can help with.

And thinking it over, even if an RCC couldn't help cut a teams noise down (which I say it can), the highest rating commlink is rating 7. Meaning the highest rating 6 jammer can't jam it.

those rating 7 commlinks are bleeding edge tech. outfitting an entire army with it is improbable.

also, you're presuming that noise doesn't stack. that may or may not be the case.

also, oddly enough no amount of jamming prevents a microtransceiver from working. you can limit the range (which is what the wireless bonus increases - dramatically, i might add), but you can't make it not work. so the rebels will still have communication available to them.

If you're going to spend a few hundred thousand nuyen to cyber up your commandoes, why would you not spend 8,000 nuyen to give them a commlink that can't be jammed, and also allows them to have better Matrix defense if something happens to the team's decker.

Noise stacks, just not noise generators. There is only so many bands of communications you can fill before you've filled the entire electromagnetic spectrum.

The micro transceiver has a sub vocal mic, which is device rating 3, so a noise of 3 would shut it down. But since there are no specific rules that say a micro transceiver's sub vocal mic is immune to jamming, the general rule still applies.

Yes, but the rules for what that jamming does aren't what you seem to think - jamming only denies wireless bonuses (one of Aaron's FAQ thread answers); the non-wireless function of the transceiver would still work.

Until its in Errata (or the Matrix book), I don't agree with Aaron's ruling being RAW.

True, why not spend 8,000¥ a pop for a Fairlight Caliban now? Before 2075/01/01 a device rating 7 commlink ran at least 67,500¥ and was at least at availability 32F, and that didn't include any software.

Well, the book says "loses it's wireless functionality". Aaron's ruling, obviously, is that "wireless functionality" refers to the "wireless" entry on an item's description. What is it you think is the RAW meaning of that undefined phrase?

It's a weird ruling, certainly, but it's at least internally consistent.

I guess that I have to concede, that does make "sense."

But I don't think I like the idea of jammers not being able to jam some types of wireless communication while others are not effected. Like in this case.

You also got to remember that the rt7 is bleeding edge for the private/corp sector.

It's always been a staple of shadowrun that govt military forces and some elite corp forces (less so for corp forces for the same reason corp militaries are usually lesser quality, corps are about cost/benefit more than govts) had access to programs, decks/commlinks, gear, weapons etc at a much higher rating/quality. They wouldn't b running around with te fairlight, but the specialized version made in small batches and custom ordered for a higher cost and with a much higher rating.

Like I say, it's a bit weird.

Shouldn't militaries simply have their own Grids?

The way I see it, a Military Grid would technically be a Local Grid - unless you're within range of the infrastructure that provides the connectivity, you can't access the grid. The caveat is that the military doesn't only use fixed infrastructure - they also use mobile infrastructure.

Naturally the military is going to have a portion of their grid which is static to provide access from permanent positions such as military bases, regimental headquarters, the Pentagon, et cetera. But they're also going to want to be able to set up mobile command centers, forward communications bases, relay outposts, and that sort of thing. Additionally, they'll certainly have communications vehicles, like some updated form of AWACS soaring in the lofty upper limits of the atmosphere, acting as airborne "cell towers" for Military Grid access.

So we've got Grunt Greg on a mission to blow up a supply depot. All his personal electronics like his smartgun system and his helmet's vision enhancements and image recorder are controlled by his commlink's PAN; and his commlink connects wirelessly to the Military Grid. He's deep in enemy territory, which means his only access to the Military Grid is through the cutting edge stealth AWACS circling somewhere overhead, temporarily making the region into part of the Local Military Grid. His squad or platoon will probably also have their own remote Spider or two assigned to them, monitoring their communications for the duration of the mission.

Now, if the Military runs their own Grid, then surely they have their own demiGOD dedicated to policing that Grid. However, I suspect that Military Grids are actually unaffiliated with GOD proper - after all, they're not part of the Corporate Council or subject to its wishes, nor are they using corporate infrastructure.

Since the point of a military grid is to provide communications to the military in question while preventing non-authorized personnel from gaining access, I imagine a Military Grid has much less forgiving protocols than ordinary Corporate Grids intended for everyday consumer Matrix connectivity. This would translate to either an increased gain rate for Overwatch Score, or a lower threshold for Convergance, or possibly both.

So let's start connecting the dots, pluggin in numbers, and seeing how this concept works.

Grunt Greg and the rest of his squad reach their destination and engage the enemy forces at the supply depot. The enemy returns fire, but also starts trying to cut off their communications. Naturally they have a few options for doing this.

1) The enemy can directly hack the individual commlinks and other devices that Grunt Greg and his squad are each carrying.
2) The enemy can instead hack the circling AWACS - assuming they can manage to detect it, as well as manage the difficult hack.
3) The enemy can deploy Jammers (hopefully Military Grade with very high Ratings) against Greg's squad, drowning them in Noise.
4) The enemy can shoot down the AWACS - again assuming they can manage to detect it, as well as hit it with something.

Since Grunt Greg and his allies are on their military's own private Grid, any hack attemps made against them from a different Grid suffer the standard -2 dice. (In fact, since Military Grids probably are independent from GOD and probably have their own custom Overwatch Score settings, they also probably have their own more restrictive custom penalties for unauthorized access. Maybe -4 dice? Maybe -6?)

The enemy hacker doesn't like the sound of operating at a hefty penalty, so they instead decide to Hack on the Fly in order to change Grids, gaining illegitimate access to Greg's Military Grid. A normal Local Grid defends against such an act with 4 dice, but this isn't a "normal" Grid: it's Milspec, and that means just like the beefed up Overwatch Score accumulation, reduced Convergence threshold, and increased off-grid penalty, getting Hack on the Fly access is harder too. Maybe the Military Grid rolls 6 dice to defend itself. Maybe it rolls 8. Who knows.

Whatever the case, the enemy hacker gets lucky and manages to fake access and hop onto the Military Grid. The cost is high, however, as they were going up against an increased defense pool which scored more hits than your average Grid would. On a normal Grid, your OS increases by 1 for every hit a target gets on their defense tests. On a Military Grid, maybe your OS increases by 2 for every hit, or even 3 or 4.

So in this case, with the Military Grid rolling 8 dice and getting a pretty average roll of 3 hits, that gets multiplied by.. hrm... let's say 3... and the enemy hacker is already at an OS of 9, just for changing grids. Of course, now that they have access to the Military Grid, they can avoid dealing with that pesky off-grid penalty to their actions, so it might be worth it.

The enemy hacker decides to go for the (comparatively) simple route and attempts to hack Grunt Greg's PAN via his commlink, hoping to gain access and wreak havoc with his gear. Greg's busy shooting his gun, and his squad's remote Spiders are busy handling an attempted intrusion from one of the enemy team's other hackers, so Greg's commlink will have to fend for itself. The enemy hacker decides to try for two Marks and rolls to Hack on the Fly.

The Milspec Firewall on Greg's commlink puts up a valiant fight, but the enemy hacker manages to get through - although not before Greg's Firewall gets 4 hits, raising their OS by another 12 points. The enemy hacker is now up to a total OS of 21, over halfway to Convergence - they'll have to work quickly before the Military Grid's demiGOD brings the hammer down!

Of course, maybe Military Grid's have a lower Convergence threshold. Maybe instead of 40 points, you only have to rack up 30. Although, with Milspec devices and programs typically being higher Rating than others, that already means they'll typically score more hits on defense rolls, which means a Hacker's OS will already be rising more quickly than normal. Having a multiplier on OS accumulation might be too harsh, especially if you also combine that with a reduced Convergence threshold. Naturally the numbers would need to be looked at in detail, but you could tweak it in various ways to strike a proper balance.

Overall, I don't really see the problem with Militaries using the extant system, so long as they operate their own Grids independent of GOD and have better gear and more punishing restrictions than than is normal for Matrix work.

~Umi

The idea is sound, but increasing the penalty of off-grid hacking AND increasing the amount of dice to hack on the fly AND increasing the amount of OS gained for hits AND reducing the convergency score seems like a lot too me. 1 or 2 of these things being changed I think is reasonable, all of these seems too far fetched (military are as much about at cutting costs as the corps)...

I imagine militaries would also employ physical countermeasures, such as narrow-beam Line-of-sight systems whenever possible.

You do realize that the Tactical Disadvantage you think exists really doesn't right? You can communicate effectively and completely with a Micro-Transceiver, and do so without ever once pinging on the Matrix. And in fact is the ideal method to communicate since it completely removes the Decker's effectiveness, especially if you do go the low-tech route and completely disable all Matrix connections prior to any attack (like any good shadowrunner team should do anyways, because, you know, broadcasting in the middle of a Zero Zone is such good business for remaining undetected).

EDIT: OOoops, already addressed. My bad.

rating 6 devices are considered bleeding-edge, with typical examples including "Billion-nuyen experimental devices, space craft"

so, no, i don't think there are mass-produced versions of rating 7 commlinks that you can outfit entire armies with. frankly, i think it was a mistake to even make a rating 7 commlink available, considering how silly it looks next to the information about what kinds of devices have a given rating.

the kinds of things that have device rating 6 tells me that neither the corps nor the military are going to be outfitting their soldiers with them. because if a single soldier was worth DR 7, then you can bet they'd have something better than that on a passenger airplane that costs millions of nuyen and similar other expensive things.

And yet, 8000 Nuyen on a communications device for a grunt is peanuts compared to the cost of the rest of their training and gear. I could see it in a heartbeat. This only goes to show that the Developers do not really have a grasp of the content they are creating.

And, much like SR4A, I fully expect to eventually see electronics that will exceed the Rating 6 Barrier.

Shiiit, SEAL 6 and the D-boys wish their comms gear only ran $8000 a unit....

Which is my point.
The Crypto Gear I carried in the 1st Gulf War ran more than that, all by itself.

Several things I want to point out.

1) te ratings in the boom you are talking about are for devices that AREN'T commlinks or Cyberdeck. Those are ratings for devices with primary functions other than matrix connectivity. It's the ratings for tanks, chocolate bars, guns and steel beams (who yes are wireless enabled in sr5, the bonus is +1 to structure and integrity reports to owner ). The devices that have a main purpose and are wireless enable able. Comms and decks are primarily devices for matrix usage and would be much stronger ad have higher ratings by any sense of logic.

2) when looking at the costs for a rating 7 Commlink, it's 8k. Easily in the mass producible range for corporations making tens of billions a quarter if they're unlucky, and if there is a demand, which for that price there easily would be. Te money that goes into training a soldier out weights the cost of equipping them in nearly every modern country.

3) the airplane argument is tied to my first point. Airplanes are meant to fly. Commlinks are meant to acces the matrix. Different purposes entirely and therefore not ridiculous in te least. The money that goes into the cost of making said airplane isn't going to be going into its connectivity (which dr is a measurement of) but in making the plane not a falling death trap.

a plane losing the ability to communicate is in many cases turning it into a flying death trap, which is only marginally better than a falling death trap.

if boeing could spend 20,000 bucks to make a 747 pretty much always able to communicate without a problem, do you think they would hesitate for even a second to spend that money, when so much of airplane safety is based on clear communication with various navigational aids and with the air traffic control tower?

if nobody cares enough to spend a flat one-time fee of 8,000 nuyen to protect an airplane that costs millions of nuyen from crashing, nobody cares enough to spend a flat one-time fee of 8,000 nuyen to protect a soldier that is considerably more able to function when denied wireless connectivity.

particularly when said wireless connectivity essentially removes your ability to hide.

I'm actually curious what kind of suicidal idiots get in planes in the SR5 universe. After all, all it would take is one good decker...

You're assuming that all planes can be Rigged, or that they accept some form of remote control. It's far more likely that most planes (at least airliners and whatnot) operate how they do today - manual controls for fine detail work, with an autoPilot program for the majority of the workaday stuff.

Not every device ever made grants full and complete access to every facet of it's systems via wireless link. If you Hack a commlink, you can't magically make it eject it's batteries, for example. Likewise if you hack a plane, all you can probably do is turn off the guidance systems or muck with the autopilot, at which point the actual pilots will take over manually.

~Umi

You can if it has a command function for that. Just like you can hack a smartgun and make it eject its magazine.

I believe his point could be interpreted as "there are not command functions for certain things".

Frankly, I expect planes probably have some sort of Manual Control Override anyways, just in case they get hacked or something. Just because we don't have the rules for it yet doesn't mean it can't exist in-setting - especially when it's already existed in previous editions.

To be honest, trying to immediately crash the plane is dumb for the aforementioned reasons. Hacking the autonav system to subtly change the planes course over time, however, has all sorts of fun possibilities. Remember, most cockpits have full AR suites, if not DNI VR, that pilots use for their pre-flight checklists, constant navigation updates, fuel checks and tank switching for in-flight balance control, etc. If you can spoof the external cameras, you can make the plane do nighttime one-gee maneuvers all damn day long and nobody on board without an auto-gyro system or something similar will know anything is amiss. I can't even tell you how many pilots have died while tapping their instruments thinking they were fucking up when they were really telling the pilot, "Homie, you best be paying attention to me because you're about to fucking die."

In my game, I imagine that pilots (at least commercial ones) are riggers and they are required to be manually jacked in while flying. This would prevent a hacker from simply taking over.

You don't need to control it, just brick it. After all, what works on a sammy's nervous system should work any pretty much any other functioning device.

Be kinda fun to watch an airplane when the navigation systems and autopilot cease functioning in a 'never non-dramatic' manner!

The nav-system and autopilot would show up blue screen of death and auto-format c: but the manual control would still work.
Sure, a pilot could have trouble flying at night over an ocean, but if enough fuel was given, he could navigate through the stars and find land...

You're assuming that the pilots of the 2070's know how to navigate in such an old fashioned and outdated way, or that aircraft have a form of "manual control override" that'll work in the eventuality that the aircraft's whole electrical system is now a Roman candle.

Or they could be flown by jacked in riggers who have all the sensors ect linked to them and the only wireless being th communication devices to the outside world. Kinda like how PC vehicles are done. Otherwise it just seems ridiculously stupid on the companies part.

And not like "let's cuts corners and save money and if crap happens whoops" stupid.

More like "let's give winter night some nukes, bugs equal rights and only elect lobotomies politicians and corp execs" stupid.

And why wouldn't they?
About learning to navigate through the stars, might seem far fetched, maybe, I don't know, I really don't see any reason why wouldn't they know about this and about the manual override what kind of vehicle doesn't have such a thing?
I have yet to see mankind dumbing down that hard not to make a manual override inside a vehicle..

With it an option as a vehicle mod in Arsenal for SR4, I'd think it's safe to say that humanity in the 2070's has dumbed that far down. So far, only motorcycles come with a manual override standard.

And with the prevalence of GPS in every commlink, who needs to know how to find Polaris when you've got a mapsoft that'll guide you to the nearest StufferShack.

i'm not sure what you think PC vehicles are like, but unless you specifically rip out all the extras, PC vehicles are just as vulnerable to being bricked as PC commlinks.

The major problem I have with the concept of "bricking" an aircraft is that it's just not how aircraft are BUILT. There isn't one single master control computer managing everything that you could conceivably destroy.

Most of the controls in aircraft are technically "manual", even if they aren't "analog". You have wires running through the craft which control various devices, but they'll all only accessible via knobs and levers and buttons in the cockpit. Air Traffic Control can't send out a signal to a plane to tell it where to go, or tell it to deploy landing gear, or tell it to dump its fuel, or really tell it to do much of anything. They can instruct the pilots about what to do, or if the pilots are incapacitated they can direct a brave passenger on how to fly, but they can't fly the damn thing themselves remotely. Someone on-board is always going to have to do the steering - be it a human or the onboard autoPilot Program.

The only parts of a commercial aircraft that rely upon "wireless connections" are the actual two-way radio system, and select weather and navigation systems. So sure, you could knock out radio communications, and you could stop the plane from receiving accurate weather information and GPS positioning, but everything else works like normal, because none of it has any connection to "wireless signals".

I can see why bricking a smartgun is feasible - the smartgun system is doing more than just projecting firing angles into your field of view, it also has direct control of the weapon's loading and chambering and firing mechanisms and whatnot. If you brick a device, you also brick the components that the device controls, hence why you can no longer operate the weapon.

But anything the bricked device doesn't directly control isn't affected. If your smartgun gets bricked, but the flashlight on the underbarrel mount isn't wired into the smartgun system, the flashlight still works.

There's simply no reason for an aircraft to have anything vital to its basic operations connected to the Matrix. An onboard pilot program with preloaded navigational data can find its own way through the sky without any trouble at all, and any changes or corrections that need to be made can be done by the pilots. Making it so any idiot with a wireless connection can muck with the plane is like making it so any idiot with a garage door opener can extend or retract the landing gear of a passing jet.

Cars are a different matter. Their basic control systems are designed for remote wireless control because that's considered to be a consumer feature - remember, most people want to be able to communicate with the GridGuide system. Sure, they could drive the car themselves if they wanted, or simply let the built in Pilot Program drive it for them if they didn't - in both cases requiring absolutely zero wireless connectivity - but they connect to the Grid because doing so has the benefit of powering their vehicles for them electrically, meaning they don't have to use gas or waste battery charge.

~Umi